Stories of espionage never cease to engage and enthral. Smith deftly uses his own experience and that of the many contributors to lead the reader through the fascinations of the secret world.

Michael Smith is a former intelligence officer and one of the leading authorities on the history of Britain’s spies. He has collected a series of thrilling and absorbing stories told by some of the greatest spies and spy writers in this one collection. Daring wartime plans devised by Ian Fleming to steal an Enigma machine for the Bletchley Park code breakers sit side by side with reports from MI6 traitor Kim Philby to Moscow Centre, operations in Bolshevik Russia by Sidney Reilly, the original Ace of Spies, and the literary spy stories of Joseph Conrad and Erskine Childers.

A variety of stories from John Buchan’s classic The 39 Steps, Conrad’s The Secret Agent; accounts by Sir Paul Dukes and George Hill of their work inside Russia, two of the earliest heroes of MI6; and descriptions by the Cambridge spies from the KGB archives of the details they passed to the Russians cover every aspect of the espionage world, each accompanied by an expert introduction from Smith.